20 December 2012

Nothing is Consistent in Buddhist Social Ethics

One of Buddhism’s greatest
strengths, and perhaps the quality that will ensure its survival in the
contemporary West, is also one of its greatest weaknesses—adaptability.As the Dharma spread from India throughout
Asia and the rest of the world, Buddhism not only informed the cultures it
encountered but became informed by them, resulting in a plurality of
“Buddhisms” rather than one monolithic, consistent tradition.Therefore, the forms of the Dharma as
practiced in Japan are very
different from those practiced in Tibet and, indeed, quite different
from one another even within the same country.The various sects of Buddhism and the diverse societies in which
Buddhism has been adopted provide differing perspectives on social issues, many
conflicting with one another.Nowhere
more visible are these inconsistent perspectives than in relationship to ethical
issues, which inform Buddhism in practice, not just theory.As there is no single Buddhism, there can be
no single code of Buddhist ethics.For
many in the West, this is problematic; conditioned by dualistic thinking, we
expect consistency, even if it is simply to determine what Buddhists “do not
believe.”

For example, if one were to posit
the question, “Do Buddhists support abortion?”
no single consistent answer would emerge. First, the phrasing of the question provides
room for inconsistency in that Buddhists, or practitioners of Buddhism, are a
group of individuals and their personal beliefs may be inconsistent with the
teachings as recorded in the texts. Even
were we to rephrase the question as, “Does Buddhism support abortion?” we would
be narrowing the possibilities only slightly, given the proliferation of forms
of the tradition. As investigated by
Peter Harvey, in An Introduction to
Buddhist Ethics, Buddhist attitudes toward abortion are not entirely
consistent, even given the first precept of not intentionally harming any
sentient life. The crux comes, as in
Christian and secular Western attitudes toward abortion, with the defining moment
of life. One predominant Buddhist
attitude defines life at the moment of conception, and thus abortion would be
considered as a breach of the first precept.
What if, however, the pregnancy causes the mother suffering, harming her
life? Thus begins an unreasonable exercise
in weighing one person’s dukkha
against that of another. Abortion, for
some Buddhists, becomes a permissible option if it relieves more suffering or
prevents more harm.

Another example of Buddhist inconsistency
in social ethics is the tradition’s multiplicitous attitudes toward gender
relations. The Buddha seems to have been
influenced by the culture of his time in initially not allowing women to enter
the sangha. As discussed by Dr. David Loy in his essay,
“What’s Wrong with Sex?” there were practical reasons that can be attributed
for the Buddha’s reluctance, such as the concern that allowing both sexes to
intermingle in the sangha would make
sexual activity more likely, which would be a hindrance to enlightenment. However, even after having been persuaded to
allow women to join, the iniquities in the monastic codes for men versus women show
how the cultural patriarchy of India
at the time was reinscribed in the Dharma.
Because of the complex interrelationship between issues of biological
sex, gender, and sexual orientation, that patriarchy and male privilege present
in Buddhism from the beginning continue to inform Buddhist attitudes toward a number
of related social issues such as prostitution and the ordination of
homosexuals.

Depiction of a hell in Sri Lankan Buddhist temple.

Possibly the most distressing
inconsistency exhibited by the Dharma is that, even though widely understood as
a religion that abhors violence and promotes peace, there have been those
people throughout history who have exploited Buddhism’s flexibility in order to
promote violence and to justify participation in warfare. This seems profoundly oppositional to the
core teachings of Buddhism, and yet adaptability can be considered to be one of
those core teachings. This example shows
the hazard of adaptability taken to the extreme. Buddhism can be what we want it to be as much
as what historically it has been shown to be; its malleability in the hands of
those with unwholesome motivations could prove dangerous. Therefore, it is very important that we seek
to establish some guiding discipline in shaping Buddhism today.

As the Dharma continues to take form
in the contemporary West, one is tempted to survey the vast historical depth
and geographical breadth of the tradition and cobble together a new practice
from the best parts of everything that has come before, discarding those which
do not agree with our current socially-conditioned attitudes. For example, if we are troubled by something
written in later Mahayana commentaries, we might look back to the “original”
Pali texts for a “definitive” word on the issue or even limit our investigation
to what has been recorded as the words of the Buddha, himself. This is often the approach currently taken in
Christianity, by fundamentalists and liberals alike, in the attempt to “get
back to” what Jesus “really” taught.

This methodology is inherently
fallacious; we can never know what the Buddha or Jesus really said and so we
are left with the texts written around them--artifacts that must be recognized
as the fallible word of humankind. Doing
so provides even greater impetus for a “shopping-cart” Buddhism, which
dismisses any teaching that does not agree with our own prescriptive
understanding of the Dharma. If we consciously
choose to distill Buddhism, however, we risk homogenizing the teachings into a
consistent, exclusive, and inflexible religion, like so many others being
practiced today. For many in the United States,
Buddhism is attractive precisely because they perceive it as not being the
rigid, hellfire-and-brimstone Christianity of our Puritan foreparents. If Buddhism were to lose its inconsistency,
it may very well lose its viability.

On the other hand, we cannot just
accept everything written about Buddhism without question. Such an approach contradicts core teachings
of the Buddha that almost everything about the practice is provisional. He viewed the Dharma as a raft used only to
take us from one shore to the other.
Another helpful analogy might be to think of Buddhism as a toolset, not
a goal in and of itself. From that set
of tools, an individual must choose those she or he recognizes as appropriate
to the job. If the tools do not fit the
task, then they can be discarded or modified.
Thus, Buddhism should take on an individualized form necessary for the
practitioner to reach enlightenment, perhaps the root of the Dharma’s inherent
inconsistency. The Buddha himself is
said to have adjusted his teachings or withheld certain teachings based on his
particular audiences and their needs, presenting the Dharma in various forms as
necessary. The Buddha’s teachings,
therefore, appear fluid and viable, qualities that paradoxically have the
possibility of changing Buddhism into something rigid and dead.

What is to keep contemporary Buddhism
in the West from befalling such a fate?
Cultivating the wholesome qualities of wisdom, compassion, and
generosity, beneficial in and of themselves, will also develop our faculty for upaya, or “skillful means” in applying
the Dharma. Upaya ensures a critical response to the teachings, giving one an
informed context from which to choose the right tools for awakening. This is different from a “shopping-cart”
approach to Buddhism, in which one’s constructed ego, subject to selective
perception, is allowed to determine which teachings should be retained and
which dismissed. Instead, with ego
extinguished, upaya permits such
decisions to arise naturally and situationally as a consequence of one’s
Buddha-nature.

Through upaya and the nurturing of wisdom, compassion, and generosity, one
might begin to see inconsistency as one of the Dharma’s most consistent
qualities—it is consistently inconsistent.
By accepting ambiguity as a norm, one can revel in Buddhism’s
inconsistent texts, attitudes, and practices, which allow paradox, sustain
reversals of belief and opinion, and permit the inclusion of the greatest
number of people in the path to enlightenment through whatever means necessary. I would argue that practice will take us a
step further than recognizing the Dharma’s inconsistencies as consistent, to
the point where we truly understand nothing to be consistent. This is not simply an act of creating semantic
nonsense to excuse Buddhism’s shortcomings, but instead a shift away from
dualistic thinking. The language of
“consistent” and “inconsistent” reinforces a faulty binary of thought
privileging an ego-constructed delusion of permanence. Any judgments about consistency are made from
a self-imposed distance between the thing being evaluated and that doing the
evaluation. Awakening means overcoming
this divide, recognizing the complex interpermeation of all things, and
exposing the insufficiency of language to describe our existence, thus ultimately
discharging the need for terms like “consistent” and “social ethics.”